Wednesday, May 1, 2013

My Scientific Misadventures

Did you hear about the Florida teen expelled from school for her unsupervised chemical forays?

Tragic.

Reading Ash and DNLee's posts over at SciAm made me furious, too. So, I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane, recounting all the stupid (but important!) things I tried in science labs, Kindergarten through College.

Disclaimer: Don't try these on school grounds. Given today's educational climate, you'd likely be in serious trouble for any of these activities.

6 comments:

* I took strong magnets to a dozen compasses.* I also looked at everything under the sun under the microscope (incl. but not limited to blood and sperm).* I did the "Lightning Storm in a Test Tube" on a 5L scale.* I built many a dry ice bomb.* Pressurized air will not remove the top from a 200mL separation funnel - but it will pop the vessel.* Turns out - methanol fires are colorless.* Turns out ordering methanol on the internet will get you a trip to the fire department.

Rubbing alcohol burns hot enough to make me worry about cracking the glass candle holder I was using to contain it. And I didn't want to blow out the flame for fear of splattering burning liquid out of the candle holder - didn't want to set my dorm room on fire.

"End result? Proud Ph.D. chemist." So schools are clearly taking the prudent steps to reduce the current glut of unemployable, advanced degrees, no?

All kidding aside, I seem to be an anomaly. I did nothing of the sort as a child. I really wasn't interested in science at all until I started getting very good grades in my college chemistry course. My experimenting skills did not develop until grad school (and neither did my accidental-fire-starting ability, coincidentally). I'm just a late bloomer I guess.

Your liver and peroxides one reminded me of my grade 12 biology class when we were learning about the liver. Dropping little pieces in peroxide was the desired test for peroxidase activity, but I decided to take it further. I added a drop or two of dish soap to the peroxide before adding the liver. The result? flammable bubbles!

In no way did I light the resulting train of bubbles on fire while grinning from ear to ear.

It's sad that schools are essentially punishing kids for being curious. It will add up to a lot less good scientists.

If you're looking for the 6 year old child who bred mosquitoes and studied each of their stages in development, that would be me though... looking at my own blood and various bits of plants with the microscope I begged my parents to buy me for Christmas aged 7 or so... oh god, so many mixtures of various shampoos etc in the bathroom would have been my initial introduction to chemistry: that, and flame tests with bits of tinsel and various things from the Christmas tree (still not quite sure which ion(s) the beautiful light blue colour from the green tinsel came from).

^ Sam Ayem, that sounds hilarious/brilliant. And makes me want to try... someone get me a potato (vegan version of liver).

Long before Mythbusters thought of it, I discovered that pushing natural gas through a diffuser in soapy water made long columns of suds that would float away into the evening sky—until you shot at them with a bottle rocket to ignite the foam! FOOM!

(Note: don't shoot at the resulting foam if it get's in a tree. Think of it as high temperature landscaping…)

See Arr Oh

Who is this masked chemist?

Finding my way through new challenges.
I was a founding blogger at Scientific American's Food Matters and Blog Syn. I once wrote for C&EN's The Haystack. I've written for Nature Chemistry, Newscripts, Chemistry Blog, Chemjobber, and Totally Synthetic.